An afternoon in the late November of 1903. Frost, gales, and abundant
rains have more than half stripped the oaks of their yellow leaves. But
the rain is over now, the sky once more a pure lucid blue above me--all
around me, in fact, since I am standing high on the top of the ancient
stupendous earthwork, grown over with oak wood and underwood of holly
and thorn and hazel with tangle of ivy and bramble and briar. It is
marvellously still; no sound from the village reaches me; I only hear
the faint rustle of the dead leaves as they fall, and the robin, for one
spied me here and has come to keep me company. At intervals he spurts
out his brilliant little fountain of sound; and that sudden bright
melody and the bright colour of the sunlit translucent leaves seem like
one thing. Nature is still, and I am still, standing concealed among
trees, or moving cautiously through the dead russet bracken. Not that
I am expecting to get a glimpse of the badger who has his hermitage in
this solitary place, but I am on forbidden ground, in the heart of a
sacred pheasant preserve, where one must do one's prowling warily. Hard
by, almost within a stone's-throw of the wood-grown earthwork on which I
stand, are the ruinous walls of Roman Calleva--the Silchester which
the antiquarians have been occupied in uncovering these dozen years
or longer. The stone walls, too, like the more ancient earthwork, are
overgrown with trees and brambles and ivy. The trees have grown upon the
wall, sending roots deep down between the stones, through the crumbling
cement; and so fast are they anchored that never a tree falls but it
brings down huge masses of masonry with it. This slow levelling process
has been going on for centuries, and it was doubtless in this way that
the buildings within the walls were pulled down long ages ago. Then the
action of the earth-worms began, and floors and foundations, with fallen
stones and tiles, were gradually buried in the soil, and what was once
a city was a dense thicket of oak and holly and thorn. Finally the wood
was cleared, and the city was a walled wheat field--so far as we know,
the ground has been cultivated since the days of King John. But the
entire history of this green walled space before me--less than twenty
centuries in duration--does not seem so very long compared with that of
the huge earthen wall I am standing on, which dates back to prehistoric
times.
Standing here, knee-deep in the dead ruddy bracken, in the "coloured
shade" of the oaks, idly watching the leaves fall fluttering to the
ground, thinking in an aimless way of the remains of the two ancient
cities before me, the British and the Roman, and of their comparative
antiquity, I am struck with the thought that the sweet sensations
produced in me by the scene differ in character from the feeling I have
had in other solitary places. The peculiar sense of satisfaction, of
restfulness, of peace, experienced here is very perfect; but in the
wilderness, where man has never been, or has at all events left no trace
of his former presence, there is ever a mysterious sense of loneliness,
of desolation, underlying our pleasure in nature. Here it seems good
to know, or to imagine, that the men I occasionally meet in my solitary
rambles, and those I see in the scattered rustic village hard by, are of
the same race, and possibly the descendants, of the people who occupied
this spot in the remote past--Iberian and Celt, and Roman and Saxon and
Dane. If that hard-featured and sour-visaged old gamekeeper, with the
cold blue unfriendly eyes, should come upon me here in my hiding-place,
and scowl as he is accustomed to do, standing silent before me, gun in
hand, to hear my excuses for trespassing in his preserves, I should say
(mentally): This man is distinctly English, and his far-off progenitors,
somewhere about sixteen hundred years ago, probably assisted at the
massacre of the inhabitants of the pleasant little city at my feet. By
and by, leaving the ruins, I may meet with other villagers of different
features and different colour in hair, skin, and eyes, and of a
pleasanter expression; and in them I may see the remote descendants of
other older races of men, some who were lords here before the Romans
came, and of others before them, even back to Neolithic times.
This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to the soul
in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the continuity of
the human race, its undying vigour, its everlastingness. After all the
tempests that have overcome it, through all mutations in such immense
stretches of time, how stable it is!
I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green plain,
an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees with the eye,
appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the house I was born in was
the oldest in the district--a century old, it was said; where the people
were the children's children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered
and colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land before these
emigrants--what of them? They, were but a memory, a tradition, a story
told in books and hardly more to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt
there for long centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had
come, a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of migrating
locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their hands, not the
faintest trace of their occupancy.
Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly cut through
a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught sight of a small black
object protruding from the side of the cutting, which turned out to be
a fragment of Indian pottery made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely
ornamented on one side. On searching further a few more pieces were
found. I took them home and preserved them carefully, experiencing
a novel and keen sense of pleasure in their possession; for though
worthless, they were man's handiwork, the only real evidence I had come
upon of that vanished people who had been before us; and it was as if
those bits of baked clay, with a pattern incised on them by a man's
finger-nail, had in them some magical property which enabled me to
realize the past, and to see that vacant plain repeopled with long dead
and forgotten men.
Doubtless we all possess the feeling in some degree--the sense of
loneliness and desolation and dismay at the thought of an uninhabited
world, and of long periods when man was not. Is it not the absence of
human life or remains rather than the illimitable wastes of thick-ribbed
ice and snow which daunts us at the thought of Arctic and Antarctic
regions? Again, in the story of the earth, as told by geology, do we not
also experience the same sense of dismay, and the soul shrinking back
on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time
when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled?
The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human
animals,--our progenitors as we must believe--who were of brutish
aspect, and whose period on this planet was so long that, compared
with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an
individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the
beginning of that cold period which, at all events in this part of the
earth, killed Palaeolithic man; yet how small a part of his racial life
even that time would seem if, as some believe, his remains may be traced
as far back as the Eocene! But after this rude man of the Quaternary and
Tertiary epochs had passed away there is a void, a period which to the
imagination seems measureless, when sun and moon and stars looked on a
waste and mindless world. When man once more reappears he seems to have
been re-created on somewhat different lines.
It is this break in the history of the human race which amazes and
daunts us, which "shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities
of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of
annihilation."
Here, in these words of Hermann Melville, we are let all at once into
the true meaning of those disquieting and seemingly indefinable emotions
so often experienced, even by the most ardent lovers of nature and of
solitude, in uninhabited deserts, on great mountains, and on the sea.
We find here the origin of that horror of mountains which was so common
until recent times. A friend once confessed to me that he was always
profoundly unhappy at sea during long voyages, and the reason was that
his sustaining belief in a superintending Power and in immortality
left him when he was on that waste of waters, which have no human
associations. The feeling, so intense in his case, is known to most if
not all of us; but we feel it faintly as a disquieting element in nature
of which we may be but vaguely conscious.
Most travelled Englishmen who have seen much of the world and resided
for long or short periods in many widely separated countries would
probably agree that there is a vast difference in the feeling of
strangeness, or want of harmony with our surroundings, experienced
in old and in new countries. It is a compound feeling and some of its
elements are the same in both cases; but in one there is a disquieting
element which the other is without. Thus, in Southern Europe, Egypt,
Syria, and in many countries of Asia, and some portions of Africa, the
wanderer from home might experience dissatisfaction and be ill at
ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony
like Tasmania, and in any new country where there were no remains of
antiquity, no links with the past, the feeling would be very much more
poignant, and in some scenes and moods would be like that sense of
desolation which assails us at the thought of the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe.
He recognizes that he is in a world on which we have but recently
entered, and in which our position is not yet assured.
Here, standing on this mound, as on other occasions past counting,
I recognize and appreciate the enormous difference which human
associations make in the effect produced on us by visible nature. In
this silent solitary place, with the walled field which was once Calleva
Atrebatum at my feet, I yet have a sense of satisfaction, of security,
never felt in a land that had no historic past. The knowledge that my
individual life is but a span, a breath; that in a little while I too
must wither and mingle like one of those fallen yellow leaves with the
mould, does not grieve me. I know it and yet disbelieve it; for am I
not here alive, where men have inhabited for thousands of years, feeling
what I now feel--their oneness with everlasting nature and the undying
human family? The very soil and wet carpet of moss on which their
feet were set, the standing trees and leaves, green or yellow, the
rain-drops, the air they breathed, the sunshine in their eyes and
hearts, was part of them, not a garment, but of their very substance and
spirit. Feeling this, death becomes an illusion; and the illusion that
the continuous life of the species (its immortality) and the individual
life are one and the same is the reality and truth. An illusion, but,
as Mill says, deprive us of our illusions and life would be intolerable.
Happily we are not easily deprived of them, since they are of the nature
of instincts and ineradicable. And this very one which our reason
can prove to be the most childish, the absurdest of all, is yet the
greatest, the most fruitful of good for the race. To those who have
discarded supernatural religion, it may be a religion, or at all events
the foundation to build one on. For there is no comfort to the healthy
natural man in being told that the good he does will not be interred
with his bones, since he does not wish to think, and in fact refuses
to think, that his bones will ever be interred. Joy in the "choir
invisible" is to him a mere poetic fancy, or at best a rarefied
transcendentalism, which fails to sustain him. If altruism, or the
religion of humanity, is a living vigorous plant, and as some believe
flourishes more with the progress of the centuries, it must, like other
"soul-growths," have a deeper, tougher woodier root in our soil.